Just a short introduction, but--
because I hate long introductions,
but Fanny is a special person, so bear with me.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940, Fanny Howe
grew up in Boston.
She is a mother of three grown children
and the author of more than 20 books of poetry and fiction.
A winner of two NEA awards, an American Book Award,
and the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize,
Howe's recent works include Economics
in 2002, and Selected Poems, published in 2000.
Howe has taught at many prestigious universities,
including Columbia, Yale, and MIT.
She recently retired, after years of teaching literature
at UC San Diego.
Howe's work bangs, and digs, and pushes.
Reading her is equivalent to being moved by a crowbar.
Her fiction and poetry are laden with both terror and compassion
for the world, and the depth of her questioning
dictates her break with traditional literary forms,
and has classified her an experimental writer.
Sorry [INAUDIBLE].
Reading Howe, at this time of war,
is devastating and liberating because her words are not
in avoidance.
She wrestles some imagined angel, animal, human down
to her writing table, and makes this presence / absence speak.
Howe writes out of contradiction,
affirming both speech and speechlessness.
The place within the human where G underline God slips in,
G dash--
or what is it, what's the underscore d--
thank you-- slips in, unable to be spelled.
The narrators of her poems are mostly the disappeared.
Perhaps this negation of self accepting-- acceptance
of suffering and knowledge of negated ones-- especially
people of color and the poor-- flings us,
her readers, out into the unfairness
and fairness of our own existence.
Prose says Howe bears more guilt than poetry, always
trying to justify itself.
My impression is that Howe's writing of fiction
has enabled her not to overload her poems.
In fiction, she works out of her own guilt,
leaving room for poems in which there
is a sense of place after guilt, perhaps where
pure encountering begins.
In a poem titled "Poems," she writes, "caught in a war of yes
against no stands pity.
It never moves is why you can't see it.
There's some hung, as up from a grassy serpent,
makes pity look and look.
Dread's at work against, not for it.
Dreads out hunting pulses, but pity is the one
that doesn't bat an eyelash.
More static than static."
There's war-- This is me again, and I'm pity in this poem not
dread--
swallowed and static, looking and looking.
There's war, and Howe's writing is dread.
"She's a wicked poet," writes Quincy Troupe.
Always shifting between the social, the political, as well
as linguistic and literary concerns.
One of the main characters in Howe's novel, Saving History,
is ironically, one might think, named Felicity,
because she suffers throughout the novel when
her child is dying.
Yet this is one of the many contradictions that makes
Howe's writing live fiercely.
There's no vindication for the reader.
You are left trapped inside Howe's questioning.
Yet fueled by the theme of what some have called
an exile of the spirit in this world,
and the painfully exciting tiny margin,
in which movement out of exile is imaginable
and perhaps possible.
Howe's poems glimmer with slim chances of hope.
This is the wicked, the happy, the pity, and the dread of what
is Howe's vision.
For the most part it is enough for Howe
to breathe, enough to make each poem a sentence a day,
something with a measurable beginning and end.
A balance, she says, and aspiration.
Her poems are lonely.
So lonely, Howe says, she will not title them and put the lid
on the loneliness.
There are mysteries to her, the writer,
and they are mysteries to us.
Her poetry is a search for soul, as lines
unravel into the sky, where time can't follow.
Grief is penciled in, alongside pursuits of luxury in which
Howe implicates herself.
I applaud Howe for upholding ethical questioning.
Her language implicates the writer and the reader.
Howe's poetry is not just words, but a stance--
a way of looking and living in the world that ushers in
anguish, quiet, bliss, all in one bang.
[APPLAUSE]